When I got to the front door, Evelyn and her mother waved and I watched as their car turned the corner, shooting streams of exhaust into the air. I held the doorknob in my hand and rubbed the key hanging around my neck.

Then I walked away.

At first I walked fast, thinking someone might be following me, but when no one came I slowed down. The thought of being left again, of Leah sending me off, was just something I could not bear, so I pushed it out of my head and started numbering each cement square on the sidewalk, counting twice every time the root of a tree buckled one in half. Once I finished, I realized I was lost. I started to feel something puffing in my belly, so I squeezed my fists tight and squinted my eyes and after a few minutes it went away. I told myself that I wasn’t lost because you could only be lost if you had somewhere to go.

I stepped over tricycles and walked past driveways with happy faces drawn in chalk. Women smiled at me as they pushed baby strollers down the street. It was getting close to dinnertime and I watched fathers get out of their cars, trading briefcases for small children. I had never been on my own before and something inside of me tingled. At the corner, I decided to follow a yellow butterfly fluttering along a line of pink flowers. I had to walk quickly to keep up, but then suddenly it disappeared and I felt more alone than I did before.

My stomach started to rumble, so I unzipped my backpack and searched inside but all I could find was a half-eaten banana, now much darker than the yellow it had been that morning. I ate it anyway. It was soft and ripe and tasted brown and made me think of Leah.

I walked faster and my legs were getting tired and my stomach was grumbling more. I reached the end of the houses and then I saw a street with a Laundromat and a convenience store. Ignoring the buzz vibrating through my ears, I found a bench and sat down and told myself that the swelling growing in my belly was only happening because I was hungry.

Four bicycles leaning against the front of the store caught my eye. They each had red ribbons woven into the wheels and I tried to trace the pattern with my eyes, but I couldn’t drown out the throbbing in my head so I took some long deep breaths. Then I pretended I was underwater, in the pool in the art building, with Leah up in the stands watching over me. I was so lost in dreams of blue that I didn’t notice the girls who came out of the store to reclaim their bikes.

“Library Girl!” one of them shouted.